I’m sure we’ve all fallen down one YouTube rabbit hole that we didn’t know we wanted. And how I wish I could type to Youtube “hey here’s what I want to see in my next 20 minutes.” Youtube may have found a solution to this problem. By allowing users to input what they want to see on a “custom feed.” Youtube recently revealed this new feature to the public. Where you can prompt the algorithm on the fly to create a custom feed for you.
All you’ll need to do is type what you want to see when it prompts you. Youtube will use Google’s Gemini model to create you a custom feed based on your needs. Whether you want short video podcasts you can listen to while you have 30 minutes to get to work. Or want to watch relaxing gameplay to help you fall asleep you can type what you want and it’ll generate a feed for you. Since its being created by an LLM you can be very detailed about what you want and don’t want to see.
This will not affect your current home feed that you have now. But you will have these custom feeds available on the top of your screen as a pinned tab. So you can have as many custom feeds as you want available at your fingertips.
YouTube is looking to better allow its users to navigate through its catalog of 20 billion videos. This is something many other platforms have started doing recently. From Bluesky to threads, Instagram and Spotify have all started implementing some form of custom feeds for there users. Expect these custom feeds to be rolled out to all users on web and mobile in the coming months.